Old Renraku Corporate Offices
Even Renraku has a presence in Lagos, as subdued as it may be. In the early 50s, Renraku set up several discreet buildings to house their corporate operations in Nigeria. These five buildings were called the "Renraku Complex" (gee, clever name), and for a while, they buzzed about with the usual corporate intrigue and brou-ha-ha. This all changed when the Crash 2.0 occurred. In the chaos that ensued, Renraku pulled out of their operations completely and mothballed the buildings, writing them off as a loss. After the crash, Renraku sent back in a skeleton crew to maintain the buildings, recovering as much physical property as possible, but looters and rioters had scoured the contents of most of the floors in four of the five buildings. The fifth building was strangely untouched. The vast majority of the drones from the five buildings were gathered at this fifth building, and attacked any passerby that came close to the building, except for those with current and valid Renraku employee IDs. A Red Samurai team was sent in with a group of researchers, and they found that the Semi-autonomous Knowbot which was running the operations of Building 5 had somehow been damaged. It initiated a lockdown protocol and acquired several resources from the other buildings to defend Building 5. In diagnostic checks, the SK stated that its main programming was to "Protect Project Dreamer at all costs." "I've seen a lot of messed up things in my life. But nothing like the run that we did in Lagos. Seems that Renraku had some primo technology locked up in one of their abandoned corporate offices in Lagos, and we were sent to retrieve it. There were five small buildings, all shaped like triangles, and formed in a perfect pentagonal formation. Four of the buildings were dead, no power or net access. The fifth one was buzzing alive, like a beehive. Drones constantly flitted about the thing, protecting it like angry hornets. We were told by our Johnson that having a Renraku personnel ID would keep the drones from attacking us. Well, the IDs that we bought were quite expensive, but they did the job. We slipped in quieter and quicker than you could imagine. We were able to retrieve the paydata, but our decker said that something wasn't right. The fifth building had some sort of internal network. It was huge, according to our decker, something that you wouldn't normally find in a corporate office. More like a mainframe used to run an Ultraviolet server or an arcology. Against our better judgment, we explored the place. In Sub-Basement 12, we found 'it'. Halls and halls of computers, medical equipment, and drones, going about their daily task like nothing ever happened. We found some dead labcoats in there, too. Dunno what happened to them. We were getting fairly spooked at this point, but the decker insisted on checking things out. We went to the center of the area and found an old 30's suspension chamber. You know, the kind that they used to put hackers into way back when? Before RAS overrides and man-portable cyberdecks? It was freezing cold, and it was occupied. A pale humanoid figure in there, barely human, was still alive, according to the suspension chamber sensors. The decker was able to figure out that the guy's name was Peter Young the Third, and that he was some sort of Renraku employee. Before we were able to find out much more than that, a bullet went through our decker's head, and very nearly missed my own. Our team was ambushed by Red Samurai in all directions. We barely made it out alive, mostly due to the help of the drones. Apparently, the Red Samurai triggered some sort of internal security system and were swarmed by a large variety of mundane drones. It just cemented the fact that secondary objectives can never ever be completed, in my mind. Peter Young? Well, it turns out that he was some sort of brilliant architect or designer or something. He made ergonomic blueprints for a variety of drones and vehicles. You know the Renraku "Conference Room" drone? He made that design at the age of 12. He had some sort of horrible motorcycle accident when he was 22 years old, and most Renraku reports list him as deceased. The way I figure, they've been keeping him alive for decades, or at least, what's left of him, in some sort of crazy virtual world. He must have been given all of the tools he needed to produce new vehicle and drone designs in there, and they just keep him going in suspended animation, jacked into a mini-Matrix for the rest of his life. The only reason that place survived the Crash was due to the fact that it was completely cut off the real world Matrix. Is he still there? Who knows? We bugged out before we could become the next hash mark on the Red Samurai's helmets. But knowing Renraku, if they really consider Peter Young to be a valuable asset, they would be in the process of moving him by now. Or blowing up Building 5, if they didn't want other people to get their hands on it."